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The Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced a £200 million in year cut to the public health budgets in England and the Department of health is holding a snap consultation over the summer how to axe the budgets.

Councillor Alan Hall, who sits on the governing body of London’s Kings College Hospital and also chairs Lewisham Council’s public scrutiny function, said: “This is a cruel conjuring trick that will directly damage public health services. The Chancellor has slashed them to the bone and now he’s cutting through the bone itself.

“Because he’s transferring the services from the NHS to local authorities he thinks that we won’t notice. But they are still the same services and public health will suffer.

“We have had scarlet fever in children at record levels this year and this is the work of public health clinicians locally. Most of Lewisham Council’s health budget is tied up in NHS contracts and axing £1.5 million in this financial year will affect services.

“He’s cutting preventative health care and so will inevitably put greater strain on the NHS. This damages not only the poorest communities but it damages all of us that benefit from preventative health services. It’s a cruel con-trick that will backfire on all of society”

The Public Health budget was directly run from the NHS but transferred to local councils in 2013 with child health service budgets transferring this year. The public health budget funds many direct NHS services such as sexual health clinics in local hospitals, health protection, drug and smoking healthcare and children’s health programmes like promoting vaccinations and breast feeding.

Local authorities up and down the country are waking up to the consequences of the announcements by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on 4th June 2015. The Department of Health launched a four week consultation on 31st July what it describes as a technical consultation on how to cut £200 million in year from England’s public health budgets previously agreed for this financial year 2015-16.

2 Comments

Well done for drawing attention to this cut in public health funding. Runs counter to all the statements from Simon Stevens downwards on the need for prevention and public health action and engagement with people in communities.Cynical decision so soon after transfer of funding and responsibilities to local government.

Some of us have been saying for a long time now that our public services are being deliberately undermined by underfunding in order to facilitate the privatisation programme.

This of course was perfectly drawn up under Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 secret cabinet papers, “the longer term options.”

Jeremy Corbyn has exposed the lies that we do not have money for our public services, even the IMF agrees with his position, and Yvette Cooper has proved that either she does not know that the private banks print money into the economy every single day every time they make a loan, the Bank of England states that 97% of all money in circulation was created as debt, or that she is deliberately lying to us.

THE FACT IS WE DO HAVE THE MONEY FOR OUR PUBLIC SERVICES.

Any politician that tells us otherwise is lying to us.

Money is created through debt, for every £1 in your pocket 97 pence was borrowed into existence by someone or a company.

That is how it has always been, we need to understand that that money could be issued debt free directly into our public services, the reason it is not is a political decision taken by politicians that favour banks.

Jeremy is offering an alternative that is cheaper for government, our government does not have to borrow a penny from anyone or anywhere, money that was issued by the government through the Bank of England.

Japan has been doing it for years and is still doing it, Japan has a stronger manufacturing base than we have, and therefore should cope better than we do, but still has to print money into it’s economy because it would collapse otherwise.

If we have such a buoyant economy as this government says we do, why are they making cuts to public expenditure?

The deficit is a lie, the Bank of England can pay off the deficit at a stroke of the Bank of England’s pen, and in case people think it is new to economics, the printing of money used to be described as Fountain Pen Money.

This is a quote from the Bank of England document below:

Money creation in reality
Lending creates deposits — broad money
determination at the aggregate level
As explained in ‘Money in the modern economy: an
introduction’, broad money is a measure of the total amount
of money held by households and companies in the economy.
Broad money is made up of bank deposits — which are
essentially IOUs from commercial banks to households and
companies — and currency — mostly IOUs from the central
bank.(4)(5) Of the two types of broad money, bank deposits
make up the vast majority — 97% of the amount currently in
circulation.(6) And in the modern economy, those bank
deposits are mostly created by commercial banks
themselves.
(

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The Socialist Health Association is a campaigning membership organisation. We promote health and well-being and the eradication of inequalities through the application of socialist principles to society and government. We believe that these objectives can best be achieved through collective rather than individual action.